The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust

The Gestapo placed Edith Hahn, an outspoken young lady studying law in Vienna, and her mother into a ghetto and gave them documents with a "J." After persuading Nazi authorities to spare her mother, Edith was soon transported to a work camp; however, when she came home, her mother had been deported. Edith, certain that she would be pursued, tore the yellow star from her clothes and fled into hiding. There, she foraged for food and spent her nights looking for a secure spot to sleep. Her partner Pepi was too afraid to assist her, but one of her Christian friends wasn't: Taking the woman's identification documents, Edith made her way to Munich. There, she ran across Nazi party member Werner Vetter, who developed feelings for her. And he married her while concealing her ethnicity, in spite of her objections and even her final admission that she was Jewish.

Edith describes a life spent in continual, almost paralyzing terror in graphic, gut-wrenching detail. She describes how German officials asked her parents' ancestry with casualness, how she refused to take any painkillers after giving birth out of concern that she might reveal her past in a deranged state, and how Edith was forced to hide in a closet with her daughter while inebriated Russian soldiers raped women on the street after her husband was captured and sent to Siberia.

Nevertheless, Edith Hahn produced an amazing communal record of survival despite the danger to her life: She managed to capture pictures inside the work camps and preserved every set of authentic and fake documents, along with letters from her deceased sweetheart, Pepi.

These hundreds of papers, which are on display at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., are the foundation of an epic tale that is nuanced, unsettling, and ultimately victorious.